“Cathedral” (1983)
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
Influential short story writer of the last decades of
the 20th century; influence comparable to
Hemingway’s in the earlier part of the century
Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, raised in Pacific
Northwest, married girlfriend right after high school
(divorced in 1982)
Blue-color background: worked as janitor, sawmill
worker (like his father); he often wrote about lower
middle class workers
Struggled with alcoholism, like his father; quit
drinking in 1977
Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
got college degree and received M.F.A. from
prestigious University of Iowa Writers
Workshop (from which Flannery O’Connor
had graduated)
Taught at several universities, including
Syracuse University in New York state
Married poet Tess Gallagher in 1988; died
that year of lung cancer
Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
His style has been called “minimalist” for its
simple, spare narration; Carver rejected the
term because it “smacks of smallness of
vision and execution.”
Some early stories are bleak but later ones,
like “Cathedral,” developed a more positive,
spiritual dimension
Vision vs. Reality
“Cathedral” is about “vision vs. reality” in
several senses
Vision of cathedrals vs. narrator’s drab reality (job,
married life)
Vision achieved in spite of real blindness
Television (mass-media) vs. real life
Art (drawing) vs. real life/ T.V.
Narrator’s Reality
Marriage: “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind
man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t
like what she saw. I shrugged” (2371); “My wife and
I hardly ever went to bed at the same time” (2375)
Job: “How long had I been in my present position?
(Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I
going to stay with it? (What were the options?)”
(2373)
Narrator’s “Vision”
Alcohol and marijuana: “Let me get you a
drink. . . . It’s one of our pastimes” (2371);
“Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as
long as I could before I fell asleep. . . . When
I did go to sleep I had these dreams” (2375).
Question: How many drinks do the characters
consume during the story?
Continual TV watching
Narrator and Robert (1)
Stereotypes of the blind:
“And his being blind bothered me. My idea of
blindness came from the movies” (2368).
“A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say” (2370).
Dark glasses (2371)
Blindness and sexuality: “Imagine a woman who
could never see herself as she was seen in the
eyes of her loved one” (2370).
Narrator and Robert (2)
Jealousy of the blind man’s intimacy with his
wife
“he touched his fingers to every part of her face”
(2368); wife wrote poem
The tapes: hearing vs. seeing
Cathedrals: Narrator’s Description (1)
Narrator speaks without drinking (2375):
(See pictures in following slides)
“They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the
sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have
to have these supports. To help hold them up,
so to speak. These supports are called
buttresses”
Chartres
Chartres
Cathedrals: Narrator’s Description (2)
(See pictures in following slides)
“They’re massive. They’re built of stone.
Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days,
when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be
close to God. In those olden days, God was
an important part of everyone’s life. You
could tell this from their cathedral-building”
(2376).
Reims
Beauvais
Cathedrals: Narrator’s View
“The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything
special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re
something to look at on late-night TV” (2376-
77)
“I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything.
Sometimes it’s hard” (2376)
Notice blind man’s embarrassment asking about
belief
Drawing the Cathedral: Art as Experience
(1)
“He closed his hand over my hand” (2377)
“I put in windows with arches. I drew flying
buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop.
The TV station went off the air” (2377).
“He moved the tips of his fingers over the
paper, all over what I had drawn, and he
nodded” (2377).
Drawing the Cathedral: Art as Experience
(2)
On the blind man’s request, narrator closes
his eyes and keeps drawing: “his fingers rode
my fingers” (2378)
When blind man tells him to look, narrator
keeps his eyes closed: “I was in my house. I
knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside
anything” (2378)
Drawing the Cathedral: Art as Experience
(3)
Compare & Contrast to:
TV experience of cathedrals: viewer is dependent
on the camera’s perspective (2375)
Blind man touching the wife’s face (2368):
narrator and his wife both help the blind man to
“see” through physical contact; jealous of one
another
Art as Experience
Does the narrator’s helping the blind man to
see make him (like) an artist? Or is the blind
man the artist, inspiring him to draw?
Does the narrator’s story help us to see? As
readers, are we like the blind man?
What is Carver’s story suggesting about
fiction/art?
Carver’s Style
Simple, direct
Colloquial
Statements of what happens, how things
work (See 2370, last ¶): “I saw my wife
laughing as she parked the car. . . .”
Carver shows the minute details of reality to
help us to see
Similar to the narrator and his wife helping the
blind man see the details of the cathedral, the
face